Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 394.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: Joel Goldfield <joel@funrsc.fairfield.edu> (23)
Subject: Re: 14.0388 e-publishing: Self-Archiving Why's
[2] From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk> (32)
Subject: online research
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 06:29:49 +0100
From: Joel Goldfield <joel@funrsc.fairfield.edu>
Subject: Re: 14.0388 e-publishing: Self-Archiving Why's
Regarding the Steven Harnad's comments & quoted comments, notably the
excerpt below:
">Research can only benefit from the much wider, unobstructed reach a
>freed online refereed corpus will provide. Researchers will be far more
>up to date and informed and research will have a much broader impact.
>
>In addition, the online medium is much more interactive, allowing
>commentaries and responses and updates to be linked to the archived
>literature, both pre- and port-refereeing. Citation linking and
>analysis (http://opcit.eprints.org), linked data-sets, and enhanced
>resources for online collaboration are among the other benefits of an
>online digital research corpus."
One problem, although much is good in this freeing of research from
dissemination barriers, is that there will be more research available,
and much will not have been peer reviewed. We researchers will have
more grain to separate from the chaff. Even for good research, it
remains to be seen how many peers are going to be available to provide
the desired vetting. Will free peer reviewing be a growth industry?
Regards,
Joel Goldfield
Modern Languages and Literatures
Fairfield University
Fairfield, Connecticut USA
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 06:52:13 +0100
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: online research
In regard to Harnad's advocacy of online self-archiving in Humanist
14.0388, my recent experiences in trawling the Web for publications on
hyperlinking and related matters come down strongly on his side. Usually I
spend little time doing this because scholars in my other areas of research
do not yet tend to publish online. So it is only recently that I have run
into the difference between papers freely available (in HTML, Postscript or
pdf format) and those under someone's lock-and-key, e.g. proceedings of the
Hypertext conferences, which the ACM owns and charges dearly for. Although
I don't like reading on screen, for the purposes of bibliographic recording
and note-taking (e.g. using the fine program Library Master) it is of
course far easier to be in the same medium as for reading. I'd suppose that
if good self-archiving mechanisms were available (one for all fields?) and
(? a big) if our universal convention as scholars were to use them, then
proprietary information-prisons like the ACM's (apologies but this is what
they seem like to the outsider) would rapidly go out of business.
I wonder, though, if everyone would self-archive. To what degree are people
in the humanities, say, worried about someone else "scooping" them? This
anxiety has always seemed ridiculous to me -- who else would be so crazy as
to attempt what I do? -- but, I have heard, not everyone is entirely open
with what they're doing. At one time a philosopher, PhD candidate I think,
said to me that if others in his field found out he was working along
particular lines, someone might "get there" ahead of him.... How very sad,
and in philosophy, too! I can more easily understand secrecy in
mathematics, where the proof of a theorem is something that may be done
once for all time, and of course also in fields of the hard sciences, but
in the humanities? O tempora....
Comments?
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Centre for Computing in the Humanities /
King's College London / Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/